High availability (HA) systems facilitate having a standby server take over in the event of undesired failures on a primary server. Goals for an HA system are to provide safety and uninterrupted operation. If a primary server fails, failover should occur automatically and operations should resume on a redundant server. However, at any point in time, only one of the two servers should have write access to certain items. For example, at any point in time there should only be one server with write access to file system metadata. In another example, at any point in time there should only be one server with write access to certain databases. When two servers both have write access, this may be referred to as a split brain scenario (SBS).
Conventional systems may have employed protocols and techniques for preventing multiple writer access leading to an SBS. However, these conventional systems may have had no bounds on the timing for a protocol. Additionally, these conventional systems may have required the redundant server to terminate the primary server. Therefore these conventional systems may have required additional hardware to facilitate the required communications and control between servers. However, it may have been possible to subvert control of a power device and therefore avoid a desired hardware reset simply by re-arranging power cords. Conventionally, these systems may have been “trigger happy”, which led to unnecessary hardware resets when an ambiguous or non-deterministic state was encountered. One unintentional occurrence that could lead to an undesired hardware reset involved a communications network breakdown or slowdown. When synchronizing communications were lost, a hardware reset may have been forced, even though all parts of the system except the communications network were healthy and single writer access was still in place.